A collection of thoughts, ideas, and opinions independently written by members of the MSU community and curated by MSU Libraries

A few thoughts on code review of scientific code

Erica Check Hayden at Nature News wrote this article about a Mozilla Science Lab effort to bring code review to scientific code. Code review is an important part of many open source, startup, and corporate software development cultures, and the goal of the Mozilla effort is to See What Happens when you throw seasoned software developers at scientific code.

After the article was published, there was a long-ish and somewhat confused Twitter conversation around Roger Peng’s skeptical quote that “We need to get more code out there, not improve how it looks.” Several of “us” were surprised because Dr. Peng (one of @simplystats) is a notable reproducible science spokesperson. After a bit of back and forth, Jeff Leeks (another one of @simplystats) wrote a long blog post explaining his view of Dr. Peng’s position.

Code is an important part of the methods for any paper that deals with real biological data.Jason Chin (@infoecho) spake thusly on Twitter (ref):

it is more important to explain what the code intends to do well than focusing at the code for science.

And yet I’ve been rejecting (or at least sending back for revisions) papers that discuss real-world results without providing a fair amount of detail as to what was actually run. This means both source code for the primary analysis (if novel to the paper) and specific versions and command line options.

Why?

Because, in my experience, as soon as “theory” touches “real data” there is a gulf of unknown size between the theory and the data. Code is what bridges that gap, and specifies how edge cases, weird features of the data, and unknown unknowns are handled or ignored.

(Remember, in theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are different. (ref))

Also note that I, personally, do not require open source licensing. It’s entirely OK, scientifically speaking, for the authors to post their code under a “no reuse” license. Sure, I’m an open source/open science nutso, and I think the funding bodies should require it, but that level of policy is not IMO part of my remit as a reviewer.

Methods are a fair target for criticism.When I read blog posts like the @simplystat’s post on how disclosing code might subject the code’s authors to unfair criticism, there’s a little game I like to play. It’s called ‘s//’. The game is, can I replace one concept systematically throughout the article and thus elucidate an underlying paradox? You can see it in action here, where I tried to point out that some fella was against Twitter because he was basically uncomfortable with technological progress.So, when I read How could code review discourage code disclosure?, I thought this: Hey, wait, they’re arguing that reviewers might criticize their computational methods, and might even be jerks about it. But doesn’t that equally apply to lab protocols and statistical assumptions? Yes, yes it does.Try it out! For example, lightly edited:

The problem here is that the reviewer deeply cares about us being wrong. This incident highlights one reason for concern. I feel we acted in pretty good faith here to try to be honest about our assumptions and open with our methods. We also responded quickly and thoroughly to the report of a mistake in our protocol. But the discussant used the fact that we had made a mistake at all to try to discredit our whole analysis with sarcasm. This sort of thing could absolutely discourage a person from discussing their experimental protocols.

As far as I’m concerned this emperor has no clothes: negative, hypercritical, sarcastic, and unfair reviewers are a standard (though frustrating) aspect of scientific exchanges, and if you want to use this to argue against mandatory code release, you are also directly arguing against peer review of …well, really anything substantive in the methods of the paper. That seems wrong to me — I’m not the biggest fan of the way we do peer review, but peer review writ large has its place.

My Twitter comment on this was that Jeff’s blog post was basically arguing that reviewers are occasionally obstreporous jerks (nolo contendere) and maybe they should be nicer. Yep, but largely irrelevant to code release!

No scientific paper should rest on only one method.If you ever see a scientific paper that concludes with, “by the single method of frobnazzling the gliblub, we have now proven that bacteria can survive on arsenic alone”, disbelieve it. No scientist should ever rely on a single type of analysis or single source of data.An interesting corollary to this is that, by and large, I’m not very worried about scientific code being wrong, at least in the primary publication. In order to publish it the authors will have to have tested it against known data sets and shown that the results are not too wonky, or otherwise shown that it’s not blatantly and obviously crazy. The real worry comes from reuse, remixing, and long-term maintenance of the code, where it may be modified by people other than its original authors, or applied to different data sets. Without solidly engineered code, it’s reuse that will lead you to places where There Be Dragons — e.g. the sign error problem. This is the difference between software engineering and research coding: most research code may not be intended for reuse, and will therefore not need to be solidly engineered. Trouble comes when it is (nearly inevitably) reused (see my own story on this).(This last paragraph, and the suspicion that most scientific code is probably not horribly wrong at first, is a somewhat surprising conclusion for me to have reached. Enjoy :)

Reproducibility is a whole ‘nother kettle of fish: for example, people in my lab have requested code from authors and received source code with syntax errors in it. So, clearly not what the original authors used… what are we to make of that?

Looking forward

Right now there’s an awful lot of apathy in the area of scientific reproducibility, despite OpEds galore. This for me is the bigger issue. Most scientists seem to be completely unaware of the need to improve our practices: many faculty are openly dismissive of investing the time, and even worse, many graduate students seem to be completely oblivious. This is incredibly bad for the future of (academic) science.

I’m a big fan of code review because, first and foremost, it means the code is accessible and executable! If most scientific research code were made available that would already be a big step forward. But it’s not enough.

What would I like to see going forward?

More biology data papers that are explicitly and easily reproducible. This, IMSO, requires releasing the full analysis code and data.

A good review culture that ensures that, prior to publication, the code is at available, exhibits basic characteristics of good software hygiene, and doesn’t “smell” funny.

Stronger top-down incentives to reward reproducibility (and ding those who don’t make the effort.)

C. Titus Brown is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics. He earned his PhD ('06) in developmental molecular biology from the California Institute of Technology. Brown is director of the laboratory for Genomics, Evolution, and Development (GED) at Michigan State University. He is a member of the Python Software Foundation and an active contributor to the open source software community. His research interests include computational biology, bioinformatics, open source software development, and software engineering.